Traveling pre-dinosaur exhibit in Mobile

MOBILE, Ala.—Step back in time 290 million years when bizarre-looking animals dominated life on land and sea, and find out about the greatest extinction the world has ever seen. This unique traveling exhibition at the Gulf Coast Exploreum Science Center brings the past back to life with full size animatronic models of the animals that ruled the world millions of years before the age of dinosaurs, in a time known as the Permian Period. This traveling exhibition runs through June 30 and showcases an amazing collection of fossils and models from this relatively unknown time period, from giant insects, bizarre looking sharks to strange reptiles with mammal-like characteristics.

View fossilized skeletons and reconstructed models of these amazing but bizarre creatures that dominated land and sea; and dig and identify fossils in the interactive dig pits throughout the exhibition.

The Permian period ended with the largest extinction Earth ever experienced, which wiped out 90% of all species on the planet. The cause of the Permian extinction had baffled scientists for the past 20 years but a recent discovery shed new light on this catastrophe: global warming. Find out how this familiar phenomenon, started by a huge volcanic eruption, set off a chain of events that led to the greatest extinction on Earth.